250 REV. W. ST. CLAIR TISDALL, D.D., ON THE BOOK OF DANIEL : 



not perused before certain words which he had hitherto regarded as 

 quite modern, at least in the way they were now used. His 

 acquaintance with literature of the age of Scott, though small, 

 embraced more, comparatively speaking, than all that had come 

 down to us of the age of Daniel, which shewed how unsafe it was to 

 argue that a word appearing in Daniel could not have been in use 

 in his lifetime merely because it was not found in the small fra,ction 

 of literature of his age which had reached us. 



Dr. Tisdall's argument at the close of his paper, based on the 

 Septuagint transliteration of some words, that they must have been 

 sufficiently archaic to have become unintelligible to the translators 

 was paralleled in the case of the titles of many of the Psalms. Both 

 these incidents showed that the respective works in which the words 

 occurred must have existed for a sufficient time before the translation 

 was made for the meaning of these words to have been lost, which 

 proved that the Higher Critics were wrong in dating the Psalms 

 for the period of the Exile, and Daniel for the reign of Antiochus 

 the Great, as those dates were too near that of the Septuagint to 

 allow of the meaning of the words to have been lost — a longer 

 time being necessarily required in the case of Psalms in daily use 

 than that of literary remains like Daniel. 



He thought we might congratulate ourselves on the fact that 

 two such learned men as Dr. Tisdall and our Chairman, Dr. Pinches, 

 were satisfied that there was nothing in the Book of Daniel 

 inconsistent with his having written it, and he pointed out the im- 

 portance of this in consequence of the prophecy (in the ninth chapter) 

 of the Seventy weeks, which fixed the time when the Messiah was to 

 come, over four hundred years before He came, a thing impossible 

 without divine revelation. 



When a Higher Critic like Professor Peake writes that no Old 

 Testament scholar of any repute now maintains that the Book was 

 written by Daniel he appears like the fabled ostrich which when 

 pursued by its enemies hid its head in the sand in order to imagine 

 that its pursuers did not exist. 



The Rev. J. E. H. Thomson, M.A., D.D., writes : I was particu- 

 larly glad when I saw in the syllabus of this session of the Victoria 

 Institute Lectures that one was to be on the date of Daniel, and 

 by so competent a scholar as Dr. Tisdall. It is approximately 



